“Editing Wikipedia is an enormous responsibility — one that I welcome,” says Ingrid Haugen.

Word had made its way to Ingrid in 2011 about the Association for Psychological Sciences Wikipedia Initiative — a project calling upon APS members to improve the information available on Wikipedia about pyschology-related topics, either by editing themselves or by asking their students to edit. Ingrid had been hoping that one of her classes at Roosevelt University in Chicago would participate in the APS initiative, so that she could learn how to edit Wikipedia. She got her wish in her final term before she graduated, when she took Lisa Lu’s course Brain and Behavior, which was participating in the APS initiative and the Wikipedia Education Program.

Professor Lu identified several articles about psychology related to brain and behavior on the English Wikipedia that needed improvement, and asked students to pick ones they were interested in working on, then assigned small groups to articles based on their selections. Ingrid was particularly interested in learning more about electroencephalography techniques, so she was glad to be assigned to the article Mu wave.

Ingrid Haugen

“I really enjoyed using code to add references, wikilinks, images, and so on,” Ingrid says. “I realize that most of my classmates found the code to be sufficiently opaque so that they had trouble using it effectively, but I found it engaging.”

Because she became so hooked on Wikipedia editing, Ingrid took the lead with her group — adding most of the content to Wikipedia, rewriting sections to achieve similar style and tone throughout the article, and interacting with editors, which she had been nervous about.

“After learning about edit wars and so on, I was unsure of how our edits would be received,” she explains. “I was relieved to find that the editors who had been following our article were interested in seeing us succeed more than anything else. One editor in particular, Tryptofish, was very active and helpful. This editor actually performed an article merge for us; the merge had been discussed on Mu wave’s talk page but I was nervous about executing it myself. This same editor gave me an editor’s barnstar when our project was completed. Receiving the barnstar actually inspired me to submit the article for the Good Article review process. I have found the community of editors to be intelligent, dedicated, and helpful.”

With input from classmates, Online Ambassador Smallman12q, and other editors, Ingrid set out making the article better throughout the duration of her course. In mid-December, Mu wave passed the Good Article review process.

“Almost every aspect of the project involved new skills, from finding secondary sources to dealing with computing code,” Ingrid says. “That made it challenging, and I enjoy challenges because they mean that I am learning a great deal by meeting them. It was exciting, if a bit intimidating, to make our writing immediately available to anybody with an internet connection. Unlike a traditional project that might never be read again after it is graded, the fruits of this assignment have the potential to live on and make a real contribution to the popular conception of the area each group addressed.”

And, she says, “it is deeply satisfying to see my work come up in a Google search, something that would never happen as the result of a term paper. To know that anybody who is curious enough about mu waves to conduct an internet search will be able to click on my article if they so choose is very exciting.”

Since completing her coursework and graduating, Ingrid has continued to make minor edits to articles, something she intends to keep doing. She says the Wikipedia assignment enabled her to feel capable of contributing something valuable to Wikipedia, and she will continue looking for opportunities to do so. She even holds out hope to have another Wikipedia assignment in a future course; she intends to keep pursuing her studies in social neuroscience at the Ph.D. level.

“I think that Wikipedia assignments are a fantastic way for students to become accustomed to thinking of themselves in a worldly, professional context rather than as on an island of very local influence,” she says.

For other examples of good work from editors in the Wikipedia Education Program, please see the trophy case.

LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

This post is available in 2 languages:

Português  • English

In English:

Yuri Leite

“I think that the knowledge produced by high-qualified college students should be available to anyone,” Professor Yuri Leite says. That’s why he has encouraged his biology students at the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo in Vitória, Brazil, to contribute to Wikipedia as part of their course assignments.

The idea came to him one day in 2009, when he was coordinating a graduate level seminar on the Charles Darwin book “The Origin of Species.” Each week, the class discussed a chapter of the book and improved the article on the Portuguese Wikipedia about Darwin’s book as they went along. Before Yuri’s class began work, the article was what’s known as a stub — a short article without much content. By the end of the term, his class had transformed the article, with extensive descriptions of each chapter.

“I think it is a waste of time, energy, knowledge, and often paper to have highly skilled undergraduate or graduate students write term papers that will be read only by the teacher and sometimes a TA, and will eventually end up in the trash can,” Yuri says.

He had always been interested in using the Internet as a teaching tool. As a teaching assistant at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1990s, Yuri found the University of Michigan’s Animal Diversity Web and Berkeley’s Understanding Evolution portals inspirational.

A beautiful view of Vitória city, where Professor Yuri Leite teaches.

He started using Wikipedia in his undergraduate Evolution course since August 2011. The course is mandatory for all biology students, and Yuri has about 30 students enroll each term. He says it will only take a few years to have his students make hundreds of contributions to free, high-quality knowledge available in Portuguese about the topics. He also sees better learning for students with a Wikipedia assignment in comparison to a traditional term paper.

“I believe they learn more, especially regarding proper citation, and what is original research and what is not. Both of these concepts are very important in science,” he says. “Wikipedia does a great job in terms of defining what an encyclopedia is, and how one should write an article citing appropriate sources, and this is a very important skill for students.”

And Yuri says his students feel more responsibility to produce high-quality work because they know their writing will be available to anyone on Wikipedia. He’s excited about the Wikipedia Education Program in Brazil, and he hopes that more professors will join the program and develop more teaching resources to stimulate the use of Wikipedia in the classroom. In fact, professor Aureo Banhos, one of his former biology students, has joined the program through an open call Wikimedia Foundation made in Brazil for the second school term of 2012 and is excited to collaborate with Yuri.

“I love reading the assignments and feeling like my students made a significant contribution by posting high-quality information on the web,” Yuri says.

LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

(more…)

In 2005, a high school freshman from Clarksville, Maryland, named Kevin Li discovered Wikipedia. Kevin was amazed that anyone would spend the time to write detailed articles on such a wide range of topics. Today, Kevin is a college senior at Washington University in St. Louis, and he has joined the ranks of those who contribute to Wikipedia.

Kevin got his start with Wikipedia editing through a class project on chronobiology where he worked in a group to improve the article on scientist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle. They brought the article all the way to Good Article status, so Kevin was excited to enroll in another class, Professor Joan Strassmann’s Behavioral Ecology course, where he would be solely responsible for an article.

“I was surprised that some of the animals and behaviors we learned about weren’t on Wikipedia,” Kevin says. “The article that I am working on, worker policing, has been in the scientific literature for more than two decades and hadn’t been discussed. It’s fun to bring some of these concepts into the wiki community, since I feel that being a contributor is equally as important as being a consumer of information.”

Worker policing — the subject of Kevin’s article — is common in honey bees.

Since the topic was not yet covered on Wikipedia, Kevin created a page that contained just the title of the article. Volunteer Heather Walls tagged the article for deletion since it had no content. Kevin came by two hours later and was surprised to discover that his page had been deleted by an editor named WilyD.

“I was contacted by the editor who had marked the page and I responded to her comments,” Kevin explains. “The misunderstanding was resolved and she was even nice enough to add a picture on the article.”

WilyD came back once Kevin had expanded it, and was impressed enough by Kevin’s work to nominate the article to appear on Wikipedia’s main page in the Did You Know section. Kevin’s article appeared on the main page on October 17 and received more than 1,500 views.

“The DYK reviewer asked me to work on the leads and to clarify some of the body paragraphs, which I happily did. Afterward, we were good to go!” Kevin says. “Many of the editors have been helpful with constructive criticism. It was really exciting to see the interest that people had for the article when it went up. I’m still working on making the article better. After some more edits, I hope to get it to Good Article status.”

Kevin is glad to see something he is interested in have more coverage on Wikipedia. That’s one of the reasons he prefers Wikipedia assignments to traditional term papers. He says while the research process is similar, he prefers Wikipedia assignments because of the large audience for his work and the collaboration that comes from work with classmates and other editors on Wikipedia articles.

“Working on wiki is like constructing a miniature classroom for yourself, where you can become an expert given the proper effort. It’s also a work station where I can collect my thoughts and organize them into a product that everyone can see,” he says. “Wikipedia is really one of those sites that I still love going to and exploring what’s out there. It feels nice to be a contributor.”

LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

“Instructor Basics: How to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool” is a new brochure. Click on the image to download the brochure from Wikimedia Commons.

University instructors around the world who are interested in incorporating Wikipedia assignments into their course curriculum are now able to access three printed brochures filled with best practices. Drawing from the experiences of hundreds of professors worldwide who have participated in the Wikipedia Education Program, the brochures provide a blueprint for how to incorporate Wikipedia assignments into university curricula.

A new brochure, titled “Instructor Basics: How to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool“, is now available from the Wikimedia Foundation and on Wikimedia Commons. This brochure covers key Wikipedia policies and structures that are important for educators wanting to incorporate a Wikipedia assignment to understand. The brochure also shows best practices on article selection and working with the community, and sample grading rubrics.

The second brochure in the series is a sample syllabus provided for instructors interested in having their students write Wikipedia articles as part of the course curriculum. This brochure has been updated based on recommendations from more instructors who have participated in the Wikipedia Education Program and feedback from the Wikipedia community. The new version provides a week-by-week breakdown of how you can incorporate a “write a Wikipedia article” assignment into your classes. It includes some key milestones that have proven effective at ensuring that students derive the greatest educational benefits from editing Wikipedia.

“The Syllabus: A 12-week assignment to write a Wikipedia article” can be downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

Finally, a Case Studies brochure offers examples of assignment types that professors around the world have used, as well as suggestions on how to grade assignments.

All three brochures are available under free licenses from Wikimedia Commons, and source files are available via email so you can translate the brochures into other languages. The Case Studies brochure, which was released earlier this year, has already been translated into several languages.

The brochures are produced as part of the Wikipedia Education Program, where volunteers support professors who are interested in assigning their students to contribute to Wikipedia. Education programs are in operation in 25 countries around the world.

LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Students in the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada improved article quality on the English Wikipedia by an average of 88 percent during Spring 2012, according to new research conducted by Luis Campos, an external data analyst. In the Wikipedia Education Program, professors assign their students to improve course-related articles, with support from Wikipedia Ambassadors who help students learn the basics of Wikipedia editing.

Experienced Wikipedia editors evaluated a random sample of articles students worked on as part of the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada in Spring 2012. The metric evaluators used, with assessment areas for comprehensiveness, sourcing, neutrality, readability, formatting, and illustrations, on a 26-point scale, is based on the Wikipedia 1.0 metric used across English Wikipedia. Evaluators provided two ratings, one for the article quality immediately prior to the first edit the student made, and one after the class had wrapped up their work; reviewers also used the same metric to evaluate articles that students created from scratch. A total of 124 articles formed the sample. Altogether (counting both new and pre-existing articles), articles improved on average 6.5 points, from 7.4 to 13.98 points on the 26-point scale. The graph below shows the quality distribution of articles before students worked on them (in blue), and the quality distributions of articles after students worked on them (in red).

Article quality improvement of sample of Wikipedia articles edited by students participating in the Spring 2012 Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada. This graph shows overall improvement (both existing and new articles).

The 124-article sample included 82 existing articles and 42 new articles created by students. Existing articles improved 2.94 points on average, from 11.26 to 14.2, with the most improved article improving by 10.25 points. An example of such an article that a student improved is the article on vocabulary development. You can see the versions prior to students’ first edits and the status it was after the class finished. The graph below shows the distribution of pre-existing articles before (blue) and after (red) student work.

Article quality improvement of sample of Wikipedia articles edited by students participating in the Spring 2012 Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada. This graph shows improvement of existing articles only.

New articles had an average score of 13.55. You can see a sample of what a student contributed to a new article by reading Temptation, a Václav Havel play. The graph below shows the distribution of quality of new articles students created through the Wikipedia Education Program.

The Spring 2012 numbers show improvement over the 2010–11 quality of students contributions from the Public Policy Initiative pilot of the U.S. program, where articles improved an average of 5.8 points. We’re encouraged to see improvement in Wikipedia’s article quality through the Wikipedia Education Program.

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

This post is available in 2 languages:

Português  • English

In English:

Edivaldo Moura Santos grew up in the countryside of the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The son of sharecroppers who worked on plantations in the region, Edivaldo discovered a love for physics in his first year of high school in the small town of Itupeva. It led him to work hard and pursue a bachelor’s and then a Ph.D. in physics, and then to teach students at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Last year, Edivaldo joined the pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program in Brazil, and he’s happy to see his students enhance the information available about physics on the Portuguese Wikipedia.

Edivaldo Moura Santos

Edivaldo’s students in his undergraduate Electromagnetism course had to write new or improve existing articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia related to their course readings. Campus Ambassador Vinicius Siqueira and Online Ambassadors Lechatjaune, Giro720, Sturm, and Olcyr helped students learn the basics of Wikipedia editing.

“I think the experience was unique,” Edivaldo says. “Not having the time and format constraints of standard written assignments gives you many more possibilities in the evaluation process. For example, having to write an encyclopedic article, the students have to be able to organize and systematize ideas and concepts. And to be able to accomplish that goal, the physical concepts have to be cemented in their minds. I had much more profound discussions with some students during the semester up to the point they really understood what they would later write on the Wikipedia.”

Edivaldo was extremely pleased with the student engagement and student learning that arose from the Wikipedia assignment.

“In a specific example, one of the articles was about the idea of electrical charge conservation,” he says. “The modern view of conservation laws in physics is totally based on the concept of symmetries and such a view is seldom discussed in a first course of Electromagnetism. The student responsible for that article, however, decided to read about topics beyond the course, such as analytical mechanics and quantum field theory. I was very happy with the final result.”

A key outcome for Edivaldo is that students are forced outside of the traditional way of learning in Brazil, where evaluation of student work is limited to written exams. While he acknowledges that exams have their place — physicists, he says, do have to be good at math — he feels that exams measure students’ ability to memorize key facts rather than truly understanding the concepts. When students had to write Wikipedia articles on topics, he says, they are forced to truly learn the concepts behind the formulas. And, of course, they improve the availability of free knowledge, spreading the wealth of information available to others interested in learning about physics.

“I discuss some physical concepts with students in more detail, and make them reflect on the definitions, theorems, and experiments that ended up in their articles,” he says. “My favorite part of doing a Wikipedia assignment is seeing students improving the content of the Portuguese Wikipedia and learning a bit of physics at the same time.”

(more…)

This post is available in 2 languages:

العربية  • English

In English

Helana Fola and Mina Saber are students of French Literature at Ain Shams University in Cairo, and neither had given much thought about contributing to Wikipedia or doing translations until they enrolled in Dr. Hoda Abaza’s French course in spring 2012. Dr. Hoda had signed up to participate in the Cairo Pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program, and was encouraging her students to translate high-quality articles from the French Wikipedia into the Arabic Wikipedia.

Helana Fola

“When I learned that I would write content for the Arabic Wikipedia, I was scared,” Helana says. “How will I write information that’s will be readen by millions?”

Helana didn’t want to translate articles from the French Wikipedia; she wanted to improve content about the Arab world on the Arabic Wikipedia. So Helana created the article on the Arabic Wikipedia events of 2011 in Egypt . She revised the article over and over, and with input from Wikipedia Ambassadors and other Arabic Wikipedia editors, she brought the article up to a Featured Article status on the Arabic Wikipedia.

“My favorite part about writing for Wikipedia is that I learned something new that’s useful to me and to my community,” Helana says. She’s also working on an article that had the chronology of the January 25 revolution in Egypt and has signed up to continue helping new students in the Wikipedia Education Program as an Ambassador in Cairo.

Mina Saber

Mina has also discovered translation skills from the Wikipedia assignment in Dr. Hoda’s class. He chose to translate and expand the article on the 2012 French presidential election (French original) (Arabic version).

“I was interested to know about the election and the political parties in France,” Mina says. “Dr. Hoda gave me the idea and I wrote the article using a lot of French newspapers and French Wikipedia articles as reference.”

Mina really enjoyed working on Wikipedia, and he was looking for his next topic to work on when tragedy struck the Ain Shams campus. Dr. Alaa Fayez, the president of Ain Shams, died in a car accident, and Mina decided he would write the article about him on the Arabic Wikipedia. Mina followed that by translating a Featured Article from the French Wikipedia about the history of Jews in Germany.

“My translation skills have improved, as have my knowledge and performance,” Mina says of the Wikipedia assignment. “My favorite part was having a new experience writing long articles on Wikipedia and seeing the page view statistics.”

Like Helana, Mina is now serving as a Wikipedia Ambassador to help new students learn how to edit Wikipedia in the next term of the Wikipedia Education Program. He credits Dr. Hoda and the Ambassadors, especially Faris El-Gwely, with helping him discover a passion for editing Wikipedia.

“I really liked the Wikipedia program, and I am happy we were given the opportunity to participate in this project,” Helana says.

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

العربية

طلاب الأدب الفرنسي في القاهرة يكتشفون مهارات الترجمة من خلال مشروع ويكيبيديا

هيلانا رأفت و مينا صابر من طلاب الأدب الفرنسي في جامعة عين شمس في القاهرة، وكلاهما لم يفكرا كثيرا في المساهمة أو الترجمة في ويكيبيديا حتى التحقا بمادة الأدب الفرنسي لدى الدكتورة هدى أباظة في ربيع عام 2012. كانت الدكتورة هدى قد قامت بالتوقيع على المشاركة في مشروع برنامج ويكيبيديا التعليمي التجريبي في القاهرة، وقامت بتشجيع طلابها على ترجمة مقالات ذات جودة عالية من ويكيبيديا الفرنسية إلى ويكيبيديا العربية، أو كتابة مقالاتهم الخاصة.

هيلانا رأفت

“لقد أصبت بالرعب عندما علمت أنني سأكتب محتوى لويكيبيديا العربية،” كما تقول هيلانا. “كيف سأتمكن من كتابة معلومات سيقرأها الملايين؟”في البداية لم ترغب هيلانا في ترجمة المقالات من ويكيبيديا الفرنسية، لقد أرادت تطوير محتوى عن العالم العربي على ويكيبيديا العربية. أنشأت هيلانا مقالة أحداث 2011 في مصر على ويكيبيديا العربية ، وتعلقت بها. قامت بتنقيح المقالة مرارا وتكرارا، وبمساهمة من سفراء ويكيبيديا وغيرهم من محرري ويكيبيديا العربية، أوصلت المقالة إلى حالة المقالة المختارة على ويكيبيديا العربية.

“الجزء المفضل لدي حول الكتابة في ويكيبيديا هو أنني تعلمت شيئا جديدا مفيدا لي ولمجتمعي ،” كما تقول هيلانا. وهي تعمل أيضا على مقال عن التسلسل الزمني لثورة 25 يناير في مصر. ووافقت على الاستمرار في مساعدة الطلاب الجدد في برنامج ويكيبيديا التعليمي كسفير في القاهرة.

مينا صابر

وقد اكتشف مينا أيضا مهارات الترجمة من خلال التحرير على ويكيبيديا في صف الدكتورة هدى أباظة. ولقد اختار ترجمة وتوسيع مقالة 2012 انتخابات الرئاسة الفرنسية.

وقال مينا “كنت مهتما بالتعرف على الانتخابات والأحزاب السياسية في فرنسا، قامت الدكتورة هدى بتزويدي بالفكرة وكتبت المقالة باستخدام الكثير من مقالات الصحف الفرنسية ومقالات ويكيبيديا الفرنسية كمرجع.”

استمتع مينا حقا بالعمل في ويكيبيديا، وكان يبحث عن موضوع للعمل المقبل حين وقعت مأساة في حرم عين شمس حيث توفي الدكتور علاء فايز رئيس جامعة عين شمس في حادث سيارة، وقرر مينا انه بإمكانه كتابة مقالة عنه في ويكيبيديا العربية. تبع مينا ذلك بترجمة مقالة مختارة من ويكيبيديا الفرنسية عن تاريخ اليهود في ألمانيا.

يقول مينا عن فوائد ويكيبيديا “تحسنت مهارات الترجمة لدي، وكذلك معرفتي وأداءي، كان الجزء المفضل لدي هو حصولي على تجربة جديدة لكتابة مقالات طويلة في ويكيبيديا ورؤية إحصاءات مشاهدة الصفحة.”

هيلانا ومينا يخدمان الآن كسفيرا لويكيبيديا لمساعدة الطلاب الجدد في المرحلة التالية على تعلم كيفية تحرير ويكيبيديا في برنامج ويكيبيديا للتعليم. ويدينان بالشكر للدكتورة هدى أباظة وللسفراء، وخاصة فارس الجويلي، لمساعدته على اكتشاف شغف تحرير ويكيبيديا.

“أنا أحب حقا برنامج ويكيبيديا، وأنا سعيدة لإعطاءنا الفرصة للمشاركة في هذا المشروع،” كما تقول هيلانا.

ليانا ديفيس، مدير اتصالات برنامج ويكيبيديا للتعليم

Dana Westerkam was entering her final year at Davidson College in Fall 2011, and like many college students, she’d had the notion that Wikipedia was a disreputable source. But, the South Carolina native says, she always felt like Wikipedia had the potential to be great, especially in the area of psychology, her field of study. So she was excited to learn that her Cognitive Psychology class, taught by Dr. Greta Munger, was participating in the Wikipedia Education Program, and that she’d be writing a Wikipedia article for class.

Dana Westerkam

With classmate Emily Matiak, Dana chose to work on the article on confabulation, a cognitive psychology article that was missing some key elements. Dana really enjoyed the work.

“It had a lot of the same feel as a traditional assignment. For example, both require the same process of acquiring research. However, the actual writing in the Wikipedia assignment allowed for much more creativity and flexibility. Students can add neat pictures that aid in their explanations and decide the layout of the page,” Dana says. “Especially as a senior in college, it was refreshing to do something different that allowed me to get creative.”

She enjoyed the assignment so much that she was excited to take a senior capstone class with Dr. Munger in Spring 2012, the History and Systems in Psychology. Dana worked alone to improve the article on insight, which she had noticed was lacking in references.

Dana’s Online Ambassador, Smallman12q, provided excellent feedback and guidance as she improved the insight article.

“I would post on his talk page, and he was extremely prompt and helpful in his responses. It helped a lot,” Dana says. “I have been extremely encouraged by the community of editors. Everyone seems ready to help each other and contribute to this Wikipedia overhaul together. Several editors have even provided me with helpful feedback for improvements, as well as guidance on how to do certain formatting issues.”

Learning wiki markup was the hardest part of the assignment for Dana, but she says she figured it out, and is confident others can, too. The downsides of learning the technology were far outweighed by having her college work published on Wikipedia.

“My favorite part was being able to show my parents what I was working on in school. Parents frequently call with the question, ‘You learning anything in school? What have you been working on?’” Dana says. “It is so boring to email them a 12-page research paper. I loved being able to say, ‘Mom and Dad, Google “confabulation” or “insight”. See that Wikipedia page that pops up… I wrote that!’”

Dana graduated from Davidson this spring and is applying to medical school. She hopes to have more opportunities to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool in the future.

“I would love to encourage other schools and professors to get involved with the project,” she says. “As a student, it is so cool to see your work published online and to know that your information will be read by many, not just yourself and your professor. It makes you feel like your work has more of a purpose than just for a grade.”

— LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Dr. Abeer El Hafez teaches Spanish to undergraduate and master’s students at Cairo University, but she understands the importance of making information available to her students on Wikipedia in their native language of Arabic. So she jumped at the chance to participate in the Wikimedia Foundation’s Cairo Pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program. Dr. Abeer received support from trained Wikipedia Ambassadors in exchange for having her students edit Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework.

Dr. Abeer talks about her experiences in Arabic.

With 13 students who all added significant information to Wikipedia, Dr. Abeer’s course ranked at the top of pilot participants in terms of contributions. Her students worked on a total of 31 articles on the Arabic Wikipedia, with some students making edits to the corresponding Spanish Wikipedia entries as well. To teach students the subject matter, Dr. Abeer told students to pick a writer from Latin America or Spain who had a high quality article on the Spanish Wikipedia. Students translated the article from the Spanish Wikipedia into Arabic.

In a few cases, when articles weren’t available on the Spanish Wikipedia, students researched and wrote articles from scratch for the Arabic Wikipedia, then updated the Spanish Wikipedia versions of the articles. One such example is the article on Laura Restrepo (in Arabic) (in Spanish), an author and journalist from Colombia. The article on the Spanish Wikipedia was a stub article, so Dr. Abeer’s student researched more information and expanded the article on the Spanish Wikipedia and created the article on the Arabic Wikipedia.

“The students were very motivated to do something practical,” Dr. Abeer said. “They got a chance to enhance the knowledge available to Arabic readers. The Wikipedia assignment is a great way to visualize their text for all of the Arabic world.”

Dr. Abeer says the traditional knowledge production at the university level can be mechanistic for some students, and mixing it up with an assignment like contributing to Wikipedia is a good way of challenging students. She looks forward to using Wikipedia with her undergraduates next term.

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

تطوير مقالات ويكيبيديا العربية والإسبانية في أحد صفوف جامعة القاهرة

تدرس الدكتورة عبير عبد الحافظ اللغة الإسبانية لصفوف المرحلة الجامعية الأولى ومرحلة الماجستير في جامعة القاهرة، وهي تدرك أهمية

الدكتورة عبير عبد الحافظ تتكلم عن تجربتها في برنامج ويكيبيديا في التعليم.

جعل المعرفة متاحة لطلابها على ويكيبيديا بلغتهم الأم، اللغة العربية. لذلك قررت الاشتراك في تجربة القاهرة من برنامج ويكيبيديا التعليمي في مؤسسة ويكيميديا. تلقت الدكتورة عبير الدعم من سفراء ويكيبيديا المدربين بهدف أن يقوم طلابها بتحرير مقالات ويكيبيديا كجزء من واجباتهم الدراسية.

وبوجود ١٣ طالب قاموا بإضافة كم كبير من المعلومات إلى ويكيبيديا، حصل صف الدكتورة عبير على الترتيب الأعلى في البرنامج من قبل كمية المساهمات، حيث أن طلابها عملوا على ٣١ مقالة في ويكيبيديا العربية، بالإضافة إلى أن بعض الطلاب عملوا على مقالات مقابلة في ويكيبيديا الإسبانية أيضا. ومن أجل أن توصل الدكتورة عبير المعلومة بشكل جيد طلبت من طلابها اختيار أحد الكتاب من أمريكا اللاتينية أو إسبانيا والذي قد ألف عنه مقالة جيدة المستوى في ويكيبيديا الإسبانية، وقام الطلاب بترجمة تلك المقالات من الإسبانية إلى العربية.

وفي بعض الحالات التي لم تكن بها المقالات متوفرة باللغة الإسبانية، قام الطلاب بكتابة المقالات باللغة العربية بدءا من الصفر، ومن ثم أضافوا المعلومات إلى مقالات ويكيبيديا الإسبانية. أحد تلك الأمثلة هو مقالة لورا ريستريبو (بالإسبانية)، مؤلفة وصحفية من كولومبيا. كانت المقالة في ويكيبيديا الإسبانية عبارة عن بذرة قصيرة، حيث قام طلاب الدكتورة عبير بالبحث عن المعلومات وتطوير المقالة على ويكيبيديا الإسبانية وأنشأوا مقالة عنها باللغة العربية أيضا.

تقول الدكتورة عبير “إن الطلاب كانوا متحمسين جدا للقيام بشيء عملي، وقد حصلوا على الفرصة لتطوير المعرفة المتاحة للقارئ العربي. إن الواجب الدراسي على ويكيبيديا هو وسيلة رائعة لتحويل نصوصهم إلى مادة قراءة لجميع العالم العربي”

كما تضيف الدكتورة عبير بأن الإنتاج المعرفي التقليدي في المستوى الجامعي من الممكن أن يكون شيء آلي بالنسبة لبعض الطلاب، وبخطلها مع واجب مثل المشاركة في ويكيبيديا هو شيء جيد لتحدي الطلاب. وتتطلع الدكتورة عبير إلى استخدام ويكيبيديا مع طلابها في صفوف المرحلة الجامعية الأولى في الفصل القادم.

Juliana Bastos Marques

A new brochure released by the Wikimedia Foundation on-wiki and in PDF contains case studies of how university instructors around the world have used Wikipedia as a teaching tool. The brochure features 15 professors from 6 different countries, including 9 different assignments professors have used and 5 different ways of grading the assignments.

For example, Professor Juliana Bastos Marques of Brazil shares how she assigns her students to write Wikipedia articles for class. The 13-week assignment encourages students to critically analyze existing Portuguese Wikipedia articles on the course topic, then suggest improvements in a sandbox, with feedback from the professor and Ambassadors, and finally move their articles to the article namespace. More information about Professor Juliana’s assignment is available on the wiki version of the Case Studies brochure.

Dalia Mohamed El Toukhy

In another assignment featured in the brochure, Professor Dalia Mohamed El Toukhy of Egypt explains how she has used translations successfully in her course. Students are learning to be professional translators for French and Arabic, so she has students select high-quality articles from the French Wikipedia that are not available on the Arabic Wikipedia, and the students translate the French into Arabic. In this assignment, Professor Dalia explains, her students get real-world translation examples while improving the quality of the Arabic Wikipedia. See more information about this idea.

Read more ideas of Wikipedia assignments and how to grade them at http://education.wikimedia.org/casestudies.

Another aspect of the on-wiki version of the brochure allows any other professor who has done a unique assignment with a Wikimedia project to create his or her own profile on wiki. Using a guided template, professors can include information about what they did with their students and how successful the project was, including rankings of how the assignment met learning objectives. Professors from around the world are encouraged to add yourself to the on-wiki version of the brochure!

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager